I did in fact. My first wife was murdered in 1978 leaving behind two very young girls. I struggled mightily for ten years to raise them well and retain my sanity.
I remarried after ten years to a woman who brought two more children into the world and I recovered some equilibrium in my life. She left me ten years later for a younger man. That brought me to my knees but I had retained custody of the children while trying to keep a business afloat. It was a desperate, painful time.
Two years later, I travelled to Israel on business and met the last, best love of my life. We planned that she would come to Canada and that we’d be together. I felt about as happy as I had ever been since Flo’s murder.
Then, about a month before Ghillia was due to fly to me, I received a phone call from Israel informing me that she too had been murdered. I remember too clearly sitting down in a heap and feeling my life drain away. I swear that I literally felt my heart break. It might seem utterly mad to some, but the heartbreak from 20 years of struggle, the monumental task of keeping my four children on a good path while hiding from them my pain, the financial pressures, all of it, seemed to come
down on my head like a load of bricks.
I left the office that day in a daze, tired beyond description, a beaten man. Yet I had to go home, pick up the kids from school, cook dinner, help them with their homework, chitchat about their day and tuck them in to bed with a story and a song.
That night was probably the loneliest of my life and I had known many. Abraham Lincoln once said, after Chancellorsville: “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it”.
I know exactly how he felt.
-Richard Darroch
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